Phil Foglio on Winning a Hugo

Comic creator Phil Foglio will shortly be issuing a compendium edition of volumes #1-#3 of Girl Genius (volume #8 of which won the first ever Best Graphic Novel Hugo Award last year). It is part of a new graphic novel line from specialist SF&F publisher, Tor. Interviewed at Robot 6, Foglio was asked whether winning a Hugo Award helped him get that deal (and various others also mentioned in the article). Here’s what he said:

It did. Being able to slap “Hugo award wining” [sic] on something before you even publish it, that will rate an automatic “well I have to try this” in the science fiction community. A lot of people in the active science fiction community already read our stuff—there’s what we call science fiction fans and science fiction readers, and for every fan there are a hundred readers who never show up at a convention or publicly identify themselves because of the shame, but they are still aware of what the awards mean.

We certainly picked up more readers, we got more people interested in the book who had never heard of it before, but just being nominated did that. Howard Tayler, who does Schlock Mercenary [which was also nominated for a Hugo] got a lot of positive blowback on that as well. He’s up again this year.

The winner of the first ever Best Graphic Novel Hugo Award, but not the first ever Graphic Novel winner of a Hugo Award. I believe that was Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1988 with under Other Forms.

Peter: Yes, you are right that the Watchmen won the 1988 Hugo Award in the one-shot category of “Other Forms,” and thus is the first graphic novel to have won a Hugo Award. But that doesn’t change the accuracy of the statement that Girl Genius is the first work to win a Hugo Award in a category solely dedicated to graphic stories and sequential art.